Damn, damn, dammit all
by Lena Ban Obsidian
Summary: High Pg-13, some drunken cursing. Norris needs to grumble about his problems. Karsh offers a listening ear.


**_Damn, damn, dammit all!_**  
Lena

Notes: First off, blast you, Uftaki! Blast you for making me want Norris/Karsh fanfiction and blast you for sending me all number of yummy pics of them and blast you in general for being so sneaky! Grr! So now I have to write this. ~_~ I hope you're *happy*, miss Sneaky Pants! 

And Also: To Anyone who Cares, and especially Von, who reviewed Silence and had a question or Two: ^_^; It is not dead. I'm working on it. Problem is, it needs a rewrite. (nope. Not Lavos. sorry.) So, you shall see updatedness, soon, I hope. But, you'll have to read it from the beginning again...plus side, the chapters will be longer. Down side, I have to scrap some of the fic. ~_~ Blah. 

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Norris stormed out of the bar in a rage, swiping one gloved hand angrily through his hair, striding purposefully down to the docks, and then back across town to the shrines. His eyes glittered with cold fire, his lips were twisted into a horrible scowl, and he looked like he might kill. 

Karsh called him 'cute' when he was like this. 

His boots crunched on the gravel and dry dirt of the cemetary walkway, and he slowed, lifting his head, realizing where he was, debating what to do. He couldn't very well make trouble for the priest who lived here, or the spirits who... well, didn't live, but sort of... er... 'hovered' here. He turned on his heel to start back the way he'd come and found himself staring at the bronze-skinned chest of someone very painfully familiar. His eyes travelled up to a smirking, smug face, set with blood-red eyes and swept with shaggy lavendar hair. Karsh was being amused at his expense, and he'd known that since the night had begun. Did the man have to rub it in his face, for godsakes?! 

"C'mon, Norr, 't'isn't s'bad," Slurred the taller man, cocking his head to the side and grabbing Norris' shoulder with one hand, partially to keep his balance and partially to forestall any escape attempts that the ex-Porre officer might make. Norris froze under his touch, and sniffed the air tentatively. Karsh was rip-roaring _drunk_ by the smell of it, and he suddenly realized that he had no desire to deal with a green innate, grumpy _bastard_ at this hour on this particular day. He shoved away from Karsh, watching the man stagger with wary, angry eyes, and started off the way he'd come, back to the main town, back to the relative safety of lamp glow and the company of others. Karsh frowned, watching him. "Whar y'goin'?" he asked, voice such a pitiful whine that he could have been a puppy. 

He stopped short, gritting his teeth. "Away from you," came his voice, deathly chill, sharp and even. "You _stupid_. Drunken. Ass." 

In retrospect, that was possibly...or rather, _probably_ not the smartest thing to have said to a man twice his weight who moved faster than most when sober, and like lightning when he wasn't restraining himself. Karsh appeared before him like an image fading in on a television screen, still a little fuzzy and muddled, grabbing him by both shoulders and shaking him now. "What's'matter?" he mumbled, troubled, his brow creasing, his sharp eyes hazy with confusion. "Why y'so mad?" 

Grabbing Karsh by both wrists, he pulled the man's hands forcibly from his shoulders, biting off each word like it was an insult to have to say it aloud. "Because you have no manners, no sense of propriety, no real sense of justice, no care for anything but yourself or _maybe_ that simpering lady Riddel, and that bloody well irritates me. Let _go_, Karsh. I'm leaving now." He tried to meet the other man's eyes, but Karsh was too smashed to allow him to succeed. Making a disgusted noise in the back of his throat, he tried to walk away and found his grip on the man reversed, his own wrists caught in strong, callused hands, the man leaning forward and peering at him with drunken curiosity before shaking his head in negation. 

"Ye're jus' pissed because..." He floundered a moment, head drifting to the side again. "B'cause Porre won' take y'back again, an'...an' y' don' like how we don' have machines an' stuff." Clearly sure of the wisdom of his opinion, Karsh nodded once, carefully, heavily. His head nearly didn't come back up when he did it. Norris scowled. 

"Back off, you idiot. I'm upset because I don't want to be here and you won't let me go." He yanked, ineffectively, at the bonds Karsh's hands had formed about his wrists. Karsh's lips curled into a lazy grin, and he squeezed a bit, not enough to do serious damage but plenty to make his bones creak. Norris winced and went still. 

Unfortunately, what the Deva said was true; he was permanently exiled from his home and all that he'd ever known before, for the actions he'd taken while part of Serge's grand quest. Now Serge was off in Arni looking for that Lavos creature they'd learned about, and he was stuck in Another World, in Termina, because he'd committed some form of 'treason'. His own people would have shot him on sight. He could never go back to his family, or the few friends he'd had. He'd gotten a little drunk to try and forget. Karsh was the sort who didn't let a man forget, and that bothered him. So he'd tried to leave, and here he was. He glowered, impotent. 

Slowly, insidiously, Karsh's eyes wandered down the lines of his captive and up again, lingering on Norris's face until the other man blushed, looking furtively away. 

"Ye're gonna hate me when y'wake up," Karsh mumbled to himself, and then flashed a positively demonic grin. 

He didn't have the chance to ask what the bloody hell Karsh meant; an Aeroblaster hit him full force and knocked him from drunk to completely unconscious. Norris's body fell limp in Karsh's arms. 

* * *

Awakening came slowly, and brought with it pain. Throbbing pain in his head; a lesser, acidic sort of pain laced all through the rest of him. The headache he attributed to his choice of beverage the night before. The other pain... 

The other pain... 

Sitting up slowly, he kept his eyes closed against the light he knew was filtering in the room, biting back a moan and trying to remember just what had happened. He was on a simple straw mattress, still in his full uniform. How exactly had he gotten to whereever here was? 

"Oi, if ye're awake, I gotta nice remedy fer the headpains, if ye want it." 

Wincing, both at the noise and the source of the all-too-familiar voice, he ventured a glance at the world. Across the small room was another bed, and in it sat Karsh, lop-sided grin on his face and small, suspicious looking bottle in his outstretched hand. "...why am I here?" He finally asked, voice breaking on the words, coming out gravelly and half an octave lower than usual. His mouth was horribly dry and his throat ached with speaking; he raised one hand to rub at the bridge of his nose, eyes squinched shut in exasperation. 

Karsh laughed, softly. "Two reasons. Ye were drunk off yer ass last night, an' so was I, so I brought ye home wi'me; and, a'course, ye had no place else ye were stayin', so I figured this'd do fer a night, at least." 

Still fighting the urge to curse at his rather persistent headache, he grumbled as coherently as his voice would let him. "How the hell do you know so much about me, and why the hell did you knock me unconscious?" He scowled. "I remember a rather suspicious blast of wind before blacking out." 

There was the sound of shifting, soft rustles of the other mattress, and then the light padding of Karsh's feet as he walked over; the bed sagged, the new weight pulling him a few inches to his right, closer to the other man as Karsh sat down. "Drink this, Norr, it'll make ye feel better." 

Willing to try anything once, he accepted the small vial of greenish liquid and downed it in one gulp. The flavor didn't register at first, and then seemed to blossom over his tongue like so much sterile medicine and fake flavoring. He gagged a little. 

"It tastes bloody disgusting," agreed Karsh's soothing voice, even as a hand reached out to rub his back in gentle circles. He found himself leaning into the motion and failing to reply in the nasty fashion he wanted. Right now he hurt, and in more ways than the physical. A little petting was in order. 

After several minutes, he found his voice again, still ragged from sleep but usable. "...you didn't answer either of my questions." 

There was a brief silence, as though Karsh was searching for the right words. "I knocked ye out b'cause ye were about to get violent...but I admit, I'd been wantin' tae blast the bejeezus outta ye fer a long while." Hiding a grin at the answer, for fear Karsh would think he was actually enjoying the company, he waited for more. It didn't come. Karsh kept rubbing at his back, silent for several long moments, either thinking or watching. (Watching what? Watching _him_?) 

Strong hands turned him about, and, almost as if asking permission, hovered over his shirt and shoulder pads for long moments before removing them. The air was chill; he shivered, leaning back into the warmth of Karsh's hands as they rubbed at the little knots of tension lining his upper back. 

He lost his voice rather quickly to the feel of those fingers working the pain right out of his skin. Just as well. Karsh answered his question with another, and he needed the time to think, while he searched for his answer. "Why the hell don't you let any of us get close enough to be friends, Norr? We ain't all bad people, ya know. An' if nothin' else, I'm good fer listenin'." 

Myriad replies flashed through his thoughts, all wrong, all fundamentally right, and the soft, soothing circles being rubbed into his skin rendered each one impossible to speak. Every touch to his skin choked his answers before they formed, and he let Karsh's hands work at his tension almost guiltily, feeling it squeezed out of him, feeling his body relax as it hadn't done in years. 

The last thing in the world that he'd wanted to do was start talking. 

He started talking. "I couldn't...before, you know, because if any of you got too close you'd know I...and besides, I had plenty of friends in Porre, so there was no reason to bother spending too much time with..." He swallowed, realized that his friends in Porre were all military, and that few, if any of them, had ever really shared any sort of bond with him at all. He had a stronger bond with...with...dragon gods, with _Karsh_ than with his own people. 

"Aye?" The fingers didn't stop; neither did he. 

"And I don't ever know who...to trust, really because--AAAhh, that hurts--because what if I guess wrong?" A hollowness, a creeping slow fear that had plagued him all his life bled through in the tone of his voice. "I don't want to end up getting myself in trouble because of making friends with the wrong person." 

Almost fearfully, he added the final flourish of his fear. "...I don't want to get hurt." 

Nimbly, Karsh worked his way down to just below Norris's smooth, soft shoulderblades and pressed, hard and true, deep into the largest knot he'd encountered yet, earning a yelp from his patient. He didn't grin, but looked puzzled and maybe troubled; he eased the pressure slightly and began kneading the knot away. 

Norris swallowed thickly, but he couldn't stop himself. "Then again, I'm really stuck now that Porre's declared me a traitor in both worlds, so I'm more or less... owowow_ow_... completely... alone." Surprised by the deep sadness in his own voice, he tried to ignore it. "I can't go home, and I don't have anything to do here, unless Serge asks me to join him again after he battles that monster he's looking for. I have...nothing to do." _Nowhere to go,_ he thought wistfully, and bit back a cry of pain as Karsh's fingers wandered lower, grazing a bruise he had from the last fight he'd been in. That particularly lovely wound was the fault of one of those nasty green innate thingummies that lived in the Hydra Swamp. He'd made the mistake of visiting, getting curious. The bruise wouldn't go away no matter what he used to try to heal it, and he gathered there must be some poison he'd been given that wasn't quite done running its course yet. It didn't seem to be getting any wose, but then, it wasn't getting any better either. 

"That hurt?" Asked Karsh's voice, gently, apologetically. "Sorry, lad, I'll avoid it." 

Swallowing again, he tried to speak more carefully, trying to stay off the subjects that he didn't feel prudent to share with a Deva. "Why are you...nn...helping me at all? Why the bloody hell don't I bother you? Most...most people find me..." He couldn't help the self-derision that started to drip from his voice, and he glanced back at Karsh over his shoulder, icy eyes unreadable. "...too stiff...prideful...willing. That sort of...aoouch!...thing." 

Karsh shrugged. "Meh. Sometimes I wonder if ye got a stick up yer arse, but yer not s'bad when ye let yerself be yerself. Y'ken?" At Norris's shy glance, he flashed a winning smile. "As fer botherin' me...hell, y'bother me plenty! But I bother ye back, do I no? Give an' take, is what it is." 

Unsure what to say beyond that, he dropped his head, letting his bangs fall in his eyes. Slowly, between the massage and the home-remedy Karsh had given him, the pain vanished into memory. He found himself fearing the need to say thank you for a service he still wasn't entirely glad to have received. Karsh finished and leaned back, watching him, equally wordless, until the stare made him uncomfortable and he turned a wary eye on the other man. 

The Deva was wearing the _stupidest_ grin... 

"What?" He grumbled, voice a little more steady now that he'd used it a little. 

What had been a grin transformed into a smirk, and Karsh shrugged, feigning innocence, rising from the bed and stretching. "Oh, nothin'." 

Not trusting this answer, he watched the other man shrewdly as he strolled towards the door of the cabin. He stopped at the door and glanced back at Norris, almost as if surprised to see him still sitting on the bed. "Well? Ye're hungry, arencha?" 

Scowling to himself, he rose from the bed and followed the other man out the door, blinking a little in the broad bright sunlight. Laughing, Karsh led the way to his kitchen, managing to keep him occupied with one-sided conversation while fixing breakfast at the same time. They ate, and he brooded, and in the afternoon he left to wander the streets of Termina. 

He was thinking, mostly. 

He came, eventually, to three conclusions. First, Karsh was willing to be his friend, and he was willing to accept that. Second, Karsh was willing to be more than his friend. Third, he wanted for Karsh to be more than any friend could be, and that frightened him. Thrilled him, too. The whole concept left him uncertain, not entirely in an unpleasant fashion. 

As his feet led him slowly back towards the Smith's old cabin and his temporary roommate, he tested all three conclusions and found them to be inescapably sound. Passing beneath the shafts of dim yellow lamplight, through the early evening fog, he could be heard muttering amusedly to himself, "Oh, damn...dammit all..." 

~End~

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